Ramp raises $300M | Hacker News Reader

Ramp raises $300M

ramp.com

63 pointszuhayeer47 comments

In January 2021, they would not let me create virtual cards for my consulting business because I did not have a $250K cash balance in my business bank account. The Ramp support guy said he didn’t know of any similar service that did not have such a requirement. After that I discovered Stripe easily provided that service for my business with no threshold at all and wrote back to let him know and he was very surprised I could get that without even having a Stripe merchant account.

Did they let you open an account before imposing this limit?

When I was looking into using them, I noted the $250,000 limit for new accounts but I'm not sure if they were always structured this way.

No, I completed the application process but they rejected me.

https://Privacy.com also has a great “Team” account.

That is a crazy high requirement. I am planning on moving to Miami and they need evidence that I've had >3 months rent in the account for 3 months. Who keeps that much money in a checking account?

Everyone should work towards being able to keep minimum 6 mos of burn in their checking account. Ideally more.

Checking account earns no interest. That's a foolish waste of money

Until it's right there when you need it. It's not called an emergency fund for nothing

Any way you slice it 6 months living expenses earning no interest is a huge expense. For the average person putting that away at 30 means delaying retirement by around 2 years. Worse you need to keep adding money in to keep up with inflation.

It’s reasonable to keep 6 weeks of living expenses on hand, but the rest doesn’t need to be in cash as long as you can quickly liquidate it.

Agree, the only requirement is sufficiently liquid, feel free to earn as much as possible given that constraint

If you can't withdraw money from your mutual fund, or put a charge on your credit card, paying rent for 6months is the least of your worries.

You could put it in a savings account where it earns .01% interest (which is what my bank is paying right now).

So that 250K would earn you a cool $25 in a year.

Ally still offers 0.5% fwiw, which would be $1250. Doesn’t keep up with inflation, but better than $25.

Business savings accounts generally give crappier rates than individual ones. I’m not aware of any major bank that gives anything greater than .05%.

Geez people - “checking account” should have been a relatively obvious figure of speech meaning “bank account”, or “cash and cash equivalents”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_and_cash_equivalents

When you pull a balance report for proving personal or business funds, your bank includes checking, money market, savings, etc., the literal type doesn’t matter as much.

(Also, for replies saying the 6 months worth should only be in a higher return higher risk account — things that can lose significant value — well, ideally, no, that’s what you do with everything beyond your six months cash and cash equivalents reserve, or carefully understand your risk exposure and ensure black swan deviations would still leave you above your reserve.)

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/753/231/981...

Keep as much as you need to give you time to liquidate other things (like stocks or mutual funds). Especially with inflation as high as it is, keeping that much money in a checking account is just boneheaded.

>Keep as much as you need to give you time to liquidate other things

And what if there's a crash and your savings takes a 40% haircut?

>And what if there's a crash and your savings takes a 40% haircut?

Also, it's worth noting that there is likely a strong correlation between a financial market crash and sudden unemployment or other issues.

there are other investment instruments that are inversely correlated to market crashes

EDIT: given truthful observation to whataboutism on an internet forum and receive quiet downvotes.

EL OH EL

Then as long as you had 6mo of living expenses, you'll still have 3mo left over. Plus all the extra months you got from previous appreciation.

Why would you want that in a checking account rather than an instant access cash saving account though? Savings interest rates suck atm, but might as well get whatever you can on it.

Not sure how they are in the US, but I've gotten 0.01% last year on my cash savings account. It's not worth keeping money there. The time you spend moving it from there to your primary account eats the interest.

You can quite easily get .5% from anything called a High Yield Savings account. They are FDIC insured. You used to be able to get as high as 1.5%, though with fed rates dropped to 0 that has gone away.

But .5% is still 50x higher than .01 (and many multiple times higher after a few years of compounding interest).

If you have a 15k rainy day fund, you're easily throwing out 1k a decade by keeping it in checkings.

I use marcus, not affiliated but here: https://www.marcus.com/us/en/savings/high-yield-savings

Edit: missed the part about you not being in the US. Not sure what options you have, but to any americans reading this, use high yield savings!

> You used to be able to get as high as 1.5%,

How young are you?

https://www.bankrate.com/banking/cds/historical-cd-interest-...

Because it was a figure of speech for “bank account”.

being able to and Actually doing it is costing (assuming 2k monthly) 600 a year in earned interest.

people shouldnt do things they dont have to

I use https://mercury.com for this and it is great; I have a card for each SaaS app with their own limits. Just a standard debit card so no credit complexity.

Went to their website. Their demo video starts by saying

> Ramp is the only spend management platform that helps you spend less.

Am I the only one extremely put off by this? You can have your puffery about how you're the best, but don't insult my intelligence.

I'm also instinctively cautious about "AI" powered accounting. The way the AI powered receipt recognition is presented makes the AI seem much more powerful than it probably is. I highly doubt you could get it to recognize a crumpled receipt. If users believe the AI is actually that good they are likely to post transactions without checking them, creating headache down the line.

You are not supposed to think twice about the Marketing Department lies; the wager is that more people are attracted by the Trump style bravado than those who are turned off by it.

Would be nice if that calculus changed, though

It might be a marketing failure, or you’re just not the target customer. If they’re targeting startups with runaway spending problems, “...the only X that helps you spend less” sounds super appealing.

At the end of the day, all that matters is the solution, how it works, and how it applies to and benefits you getting conveyed is all that matters

Businesses don't like smart customers.

Out of curiosity, anyone who knows how they're making money?

Their pricing pages says that everything is $0 (free).

https://ramp.com/pricing

Guessing it's from interchange, similar to most credit card providers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee

> 3. Sharing Data

(TL;DR: they also probably earn money from your data)

> We share Personal Data with Third-Party Service Providers or as requested by a Company or its Employees. We also share Personal Data with regulators, law enforcement, financial services providers, or other authorized third parties as required by law.

> We may reasonably transform Personal Data into De-identified Data by anonymizing it or by aggregating or combining it with other data to mask its relation to particular individuals. De-Identified Data is no longer Personal Data and we may use De-Identified Data and share it publicly or with third parties without your permission.

> We may add or change how or when we use affiliates or third parties to process Personal Data without notifying you, except that any use of Personal Data will be consistent with this Privacy Policy.

https://ramp.com/privacy-policy

FWIW we use Ramp at CoSell and really like it. As an admin it makes life easy, and I’ve found that issuing every employee a company card is super nice. The expense reporting is especially nice, no need for expensify etc. Happy to answer questions if anyone has any.

Remarkable — all that without explaining anywhere what a “corporate card” is. Is it a debit card (debits immediately)? Or a delayed debit card (debits at month end)? Or a credit card (credit balance up to a specified limit)?

And why do they brag about “no credit checks”? Brex already tried that in the beginning. That’s really only a thing for businesses so small that they definitely do not need a corporate credit card (and who are bad at picking banks). I scaled a startup to 100 people and had 0 need for issuing cards to employees…

But all of these companies seems to do really well, so there must be plenty of demand…

Really big fan of this company. Saved our team a huge amount of accounting time in the first week alone, and on-boarding was super easy (less than 48 hours and we were running).

I'll bite - how did they save you a bunch of time in the first week? And how much time are we talking?

We converted from Amex Platinum Business and Chase Ink to Ramp. Before Ramp, each of our team members had one corporate card, and had to submit documentation for each charge on their card monthly - what it was for, which project it was in relation to, etc.

With Ramp, we can instantly create multiple cards per staff member, so they have one card per project we're working on. Our accounting group then immediately knows how to categorize that expense (because that card is ONLY used for that project), and Ramp reminds our staff to forward along the receipt (which it automatically links to the transaction). Our accounting group doesn't have to lift a finger.

It makes the whole process completely mindless, whereas before it was filled with lots of busy work to keep our accounting clean and organized.

The fact that it's free is icing on the cake. Big fan.

Can someone please explain to me the strategy behind raising 4 rounds within 12 months? Doesn't really make sense to me besides chasing the hype

VC money (and money in general) is cheap and plentiful right now. The "strategy" is to take all you can while this environment lasts.

Well, what really matters in finance are the financials. What is the cash back % on this card, and do they have effectively a revolving loan, like my Amex and Chase cards?

1.5% cash back.

The difference with Ramp is they are connected to your business bank account and can automatically increase your limit as you grow vs traditional companies like AMEX that require you to manually submit your financials and go through review etc. Also just in general better UI/UX and support etc.

We moved to Ramp as AMEX was unable to scale our limit fast enough.

Has anyone switched from Brex to Ramp? Or vice versa? I’m having trouble understanding any significant differences between them other than competing on cash back.

The full width marquee on the home page is a neat design trick, once or twice, but there's 5 of them or more! Madness madness madness

People at Ramp are not pleasant from my experience, go with Brex. High ego from social media, bad execution. And no im not from Brex, I wanted to use Ramp and never got a response from their high brow new grad PM who wouldn't care to explain what makes them different from Brex. Avoid douchebag companies, have had a great experience with Brex.

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